Television and similar broadcast technologies have made tremendous progress over the years. Apart from gradually improving the quality of the send and receive equipment, there has been the introduction of color broadcasts, high definition television, and recently digital television.
Today's digital television (DTV) is delivered over a dedicated broadcast network, by satellite, cable, and terrestrial transmission. The more widely used transport based standard employed for these broadcast networks is Motion Pictures Expert Group (MPEG). MPEG is an encoding and compression standard for digital broadcast content. MPEG provides compression support for television quality transmission of video broadcast content. Moreover, MPEG provides for compressed audio, control, and even user broadcast content. It is for example, used in the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), and Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) standards for digital television content. MPEG is also used in storage of broadcast content on Digital Versatile Discs (DVD).
However, since the growth of the Internet in recent years, there is an increased desire for more services, such as high quality broadcast content to be offered over the Internet, beyond the usual content for which the Internet was first designed. The transmission of broadcast content over an Internet Protocol (IP) based network can open up new opportunities for both a consumer and a content owner.
The application or trend of taking content originated within the DTV domain for redistribution within the IP domain is known as convergence. In general, convergence calls for the seamless flow of content between DTV and IP domains.
There remain several problems however, with transmission of such DTV content over IP-based networks, because the current transport standard for broadcast content is not compatible with current IP-based transport standards. For example, limited network bandwidth on some IP networks, may call for the use of more efficient compression/decompression techniques (CODECs) and/or lower bitrate transmissions.
Providing broadcast content over the Internet also creates a tremendous risk for piracy of the broadcast content. Such risk for piracy may arise at any place along the communication path that the broadcast content is exposed. Without appropriate protection, the broadcast content can be illicitly intercepted, stolen, copied, and redistributed, thus depriving broadcast content owners of their profits. In order to transcode or transrate content, the content must be in the clear. This may therefore expose the content for possible piracy, at least until it may be again re-encrypted. So the transcoding device must be secured. Additionally the content must be re-encrypted to secure the transcoded retransmission. Current approaches to protecting broadcast content employ security mechanisms, such conditional access systems (CAS), which are different and often incompatible with IP-based network security mechanisms, such as Digital Rights Management (DRM). Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.